ROSCon is a developers’ conference, in the model of PyCon and BoostCon. Following the success of the inaugural ROSCon in St. Paul, Minnesota this year’s ROSCon will be held in Stuttgart, Germany, immediately following the ICRA conference.

The Orocos Toolchain developers are content[1] to announce the 2.6 release cycle of the Orocos Toolchain. As in the previous release cycle, the emphasis is on stability, incremental development and stable API's.

The Robotics teams of the CEA LIST (France) are organizing some Tech days for our research partners. Since we are (heavily) using Orocos (mainly RTT, OCL) we thought that the Orocos community might be interested as well.

Taking advantage that quite a few Orocos users and developers were attending IROS 2011 in San Francisco, USA, an informal meeting was organized to get to know each other and exchange our experiences and use cases.

Among the attendants were people from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, that were showing live demos on robots like the PR2, the Kuka LWR, and the Kuka Youbot; NASA, that is currently using and evaluating Orocos in the context of the Robonaut 2 project; and PAL Robotics, that uses Orocos on their biped and wheeled robots REEM-B and REEM, respectively.

Meeting developers from the mailing list in person is always great as it attaches a face to the email. Moreover, getting the opportunity to learn about the other's challenges and success stories is great for identifying future collaborations and moving the Orocos community forward. We hope to repeat this experience soon, and with more of us!